I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.

I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.

In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?

  • _bcron_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    1 month ago

    Purely anecdotal but I tend to avoid any sensitive hardware purchases off of Amazon because they suck at packaging things a lot of times and I’ve had more than a few DOA components because they just tossed the box into an even larger box then apparently yeeted it down a flight of stairs

    Edit: I should add that I live 10 minutes from a Microcenter which plays a large part in my overall pickiness, but that said, when I’m looking for something sensitive to handling and needs to be purchased online I stick to computer hardware retailers solely because they love packing peanuts and bubble wrap as much as the components love them

    • warm@kbin.earth
      2·
      1 month ago

      But Amazon will just replace them for free without any trouble, which is why I tend to go to Amazon for sensitive hardware, for the peace of mind.

      The last time I purchased something from another electronics store, it was faulty and they tried their absolute hardest to refuse to take it back and then still wanted me to pay for a courier to return it - congratulations, you lost a customer.